A few months ago, I was helping out a customer with a time configuration issue on their vSphere environment. For one specific question, I investigated and wrote the post: ESXi Time Configuration: Don’t point it towards the Windows Domain name However, while doing the investigations, I went through various documents produced by VMware. As NTP [...]

These days, I am working on a project involving VMware Capacity Planner. Part of its deployment means that one has to troubleshoot access issues, in order to get successful inventory and performance scans. I am planning to write a couple of posts to document tips that one generally doesn't find in documentation. In the meantime, [...]

In my previous post, I mentioned that I use StarWind Software's iSCSI SAN software to provide iSCSI LUNs for my home lab. In this post, I'll document the process to create a simple shared iSCSI LUN setup. Using that, one can provide as many LUNs as required to an ESXi setup, possibly with multipathing - [...]

Like all VMware techies, I have also installed shared storage in different ways, to experiment with high-availability solutions. One thing that has always bugged me is that virtual appliances providing shared storage, need to have the virtual environment running as a prerequisite. In a home lab, one might not have an external NAS box so [...]

There are times when one needs to "quickly" find out what time a machine was last rebooted. Now I know that there are events in the "System" log that announce starting of the event log service but logs can be truncated after last boot and going to the event log and filtering, can take some [...]

One of my colleagues is currently researching cloud services. Like me, he is also very interested in VMware Hybrid Cloud and created an account as soon as it was made available. However, despite using supported browsers, he ran into problems trying to delete a virtual machine that he had created earlier. Every time he tried, [...]

In the past couple of years, the term "cloud services" has become very fashionable. Every company wants to be on it. So, even if your day-to-day job is not virtualization, it still makes sense to know about it. Now, even though a cloud service is just a platform outside your own private environment, to someone [...]

In the first and second posts of this series, I covered my thought process for deciding what hardware and software to use for my new lab machine and then what I actually bought and built, respectively. In this last post of the series, I intend to cover some optimizations I did after the build, some [...]

In my last post, I discussed the things that are important to me when I am considering to build a new machine for my lab and my reasons for choosing certain options when building a new one. I promised to report on what I bought and built after making the decisions above and how it went, [...]

While working with server builds and configurations, one is frequently faced with a scenario where the system (as a client), needs to connect to a server at the other end and the process doesn't work. If one's lucky then an intelligent message is returned by the interface, hinting about the problem but more often than not, the [...]